Night of a lifetime for Koppel

Collects news Emmys for career, Discovery special

Ted Koppel came up to New York to accept a lifetime achievement award — and sing a song he wrote for his wife — from the News & Documentary Emmys but instead walked away with two prizes.

Koppel's Discovery Channel special "Iran: The Most Dangerous Nation" won as the year's outstanding longform informational program. It was Koppel's fortysomethingth Emmy for a long career at ABC News and Discovery, a career that led luminaries from Jon Stewart to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to CBS' Rick Kaplan to extol him.

International coverage won heavily Monday night in the 28th annual awards outing that honored the best in the business during the past year. PBS led all networks with 10 awards, including four for "Frontline" (including a broadband Emmy) that also was honored with fellow PBS documentary series "POV" with a special achievement award. CBS News won five Emmys, including four for "60 Minutes." Discovery Channel and NBC News each won three awards and Cinemax won two awards. Ann Curry's reporting from Darfur on the "NBC Nightly News" won one of the top awards, best story in a newscast. "NBC Nightly News" won two awards.

The late Ed Bradley was honored for one of his last reports, a "60 Minutes" investigation on the unraveling Duke University rape case. "60 Minutes" correspondent emeritus Mike Wallace won in the interview category for his interview last summer with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The top docu awards, the final of the night, went to Cinemax Reel Life for "God Sleeps in Rwanda" and "Shake Hands With the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire" from the Documentary Channel. Both winning docus dealt with the Rwandian genocide of the 1990s, one through the eyes of women affected and the other following Canadian peacekeeper Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire.

"NBC Nightly News" won for breaking news story in a regularly scheduled newscast and its coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, as well as Curry's "Crisis in Darfur." "The CBS Evening News" and correspondent Lara Logan won for her coverage of Marines trying to clean up Ramadi, Iraq, that appeared on the "CBS Evening News."

CNN won for longform coverage of a breaking-news story for its coverage of Election Night 2006.

This year's ceremony also included the winners for the news categories of the International Emmys. BBC News won the news award for "Lebanon Crisis" and Guardian Films for BBC Two won the current affairs award for "Baghdad: A Doctor's Story," a docu shot by an Iraq doctor in a Baghdad emergency room.